To me the crown of the visit of a city is when I find a homely place where to sit down for a while. It does not have to be a restaurant: it can be a bench, a fountain or some stairs, where I can stay in peace for a while, assimilating the impression of the city. This place will be my home in that city while I am there, and ever since in my memories.

It does not have to be a restaurant, but it is a majestic feeling when I succeed in finding a restaurant which is suitable for becoming such a home. A restaurant which, with its natural and personal atmosphere, simple furnishings, the objects piling up above the counter and on the walls, and the informal manners of the waiter from the beginning suggests this homeliness and timelessness. A place that is visited by the people in the neighborhood both for the sake of the kitchen and of the company.

I’m no gourmand, so when I manage to find such a place, I’m not anxious about the quality of its kitchen. In a really authentic place the chef cannot be bad either, especially if local people really go there. Now, however, as we visited Urbino in a company of gourmands, I made all efforts to find something that would please them from this point of view as well.

When we were in Urbino a year and half ago, we were looking for such a place at dinner time, but in vain. Finally in the wine-house at the end of via Raffaello they gave us some tips, adding with resignation that “anyway, there is no free table there at this time”. Finally there was one in the cellar of L’Angolo Divino, and it was not bad either, but I thought that for the next occasion it would be better to become proficient well in advance in the restaurants of the town.

The category just described is called in Italy osteria (inn), trattoria (hash-house) or taverna (pub). Unfortunately the orientation is made more difficult by the fact that recently many fashionable restaurants too adopted these names to evoke a traditional feeling, just like modern csárda’s do in Hungary. Nevertheless this is a good starting point. I have therefore composed from the web a list of restaurants in Urbino, putting on the first place those bearing the above names, and then I have searched for their mentions on the main blog servers. I supposed that tourists reporting on their impressions would also mention the restaurants they found sympathetic. I especially counted on the opinions of those coming round from other Italian cities who would know local standards better than foreigners. And I was not disappointed indeed. Various blog authors in various languages recommended the following places entro le mura of Urbino (moving the mouse over their names you can read some short info on them):

Naturally in and immediately around the town there are a lot more – about forty – restaurants, and it is not certain that some of them are not better than these eight ones. These only differ from the rest in that they possess “web references”, while the others do not, so if you have only a few time for experimenting – like we did now – then it is safer to try these.

If our benevolent Readers have good experiences with any other restaurant, we would gladly insert them too on the map.

Urbino, Taverna degli Artisti, via Bramante 52. Photo by Sára Nagy.

From these eight we have chosen this time the Taverna degli Artisti. This place can be found towards the end of via Bramante, almost at the town gate, far from any shop or restaurant, and its trade-sign is only a little lamp above the door and a modest board in the shop-window. Without the above preliminary studies we would have certainly not entered here. Enlightened, however, we also knew that we would have to necessarily book a table, if there will be any free table here at all by the time we arrive to Urbino.

And there was one. True, only at ten and a half, one single table. The two half-cellars – as you have to descend on scales from the street, but the room has windows on the other side through which you can look down on the town – were filled up by students, perhaps from the faculty of fine arts, of great importance in Urbino, that might also explain the name of the place. Another explanation is granted by the 18th-century frescoes decorating all the premises of the restaurant. These, if you have a closer look at them, have been just recently made, in original style. They were most probably painted by the students of the faculty, perhaps consuming in the evening what they worked for during the daytime.

If it happened really so, then it was a splendid deal for them. In fact, the kitchen of the Taverna degli Artisti is so fantastic that it surpasses every other Italian restaurant known to me. I have been visiting Italy for more than twenty years as a student, an interpreter, a researcher and for seeing my friends, but I have never tasted so refined dishes that I can compare only with those of the subtlest Chinese restaurants in China. We have asked for fresh mushroom salad, chitarrine (a typical pasta of Marche), ravioli with walnut and mushroom, buffalo-milk mozzarella that, in contrast to the one you can buy in the shops, melted in the mouth like sponge cake, and a majestic roasted lamb’s cutlet – but I think any other composition of this kitchen would have fascinated us as well. The wine of the house was an especially fine, light one from Marche in bottles of one liter, a real refreshment after the heavy Tuscan wines. We have ordered twice of it, and we have also asked for a dessert, but even so we have paid less than 18 euros per head at the end of the dinner.

And then there are yet seven – or, if we disregard the already tested and approved Angolo Divino, then six – warranted places left for the next visits. I do not know whether they will be able to surpass the Artisti, but one thing is sure, that we will find much pleasure in testing them.

Update. We have just discovered that four days ago Ashley and Jason, owners of the nearby agriturismoLa Tavola Marche – and friends of Giulia mentioned in our previous post – also were in Urbino, also had a dinner in the Artisti, and they confirm our suspicion that the frescoes were in fact painted by art students. – It is interesting – and comforting – to see that the last photo of their post shows unharmed that inscription on the town’s statue of Raffaello which we had seen broken three days earlier together with the right hand of the putto holding it.

Urbino seen from the north-west. Source: Home in Rome. Absolutely click on the image!

Urbino really emerges so unexpectedly, without any transition on the mountain-top among the green hills, like the medieval castles in the book of hours of the Duke of Berry. Other medieval Italian towns are encircled by large zones of modern suburbs, but Urbino was tailored so disproportionately large by the 15th-century building activity of the Duke Federigo da Montefeltro like the coat of a newborn puppy, so that the town has not yet managed to entirely fill it up. True, in the course of the last century a modern university quarter has been established to the north of the walls, but it completely disappears between the green hills, only the students fill with vitality the city in the twenty-four hours of the day.

However, the main view of the town is from the south-west, as it appears for the first time to the traveler coming from Florence or Rome. The impressive twin towers with the three-storied loggia between them look as if this were a colossal main gate of the city, monumentally increasing the proportions of the town and of the palace. This, however, is a well calculated architectural trick. In the reality the towers flank the back-windows of the palace, whose main entrance opens on the other side, towards the main square. Urbino keeps up the appearance outside, but inside it lives its own life.

This fascinating town is in fact surprisingly small. You can walk through it from the north to the south in ten minutes – true, in the other direction you need at least twice as much time because of the enormous difference in level. Nevertheless, the visitor feels it spacious and large, for it is rich, refined and vivid, and it has everything that is necessary to perfection: good restaurants, cafés and enotecas, that is wine-shops visited by the locals, museums and palaces, churches and oratories with religious companies active since the Middle Ages, good bookshops, university clubs, art workshops, Bible reading circles, associations of mushroom gatherers and alpinists, botanical gardens and many green spots. It is like a small-scale model for every other Italian town, an ideal city as it has been regarded since the Renaissance, and as it was represented in the idealized image by Piero della Francesca in the gallery of the Palazzo Ducale, one of the most distinguished galleries of modern Italy.

The most illustrious monument of the town is naturally the Palazzo Ducale founded by Duke Federigo in the second part of the 1400s and built by several outstanding masters who all had learnt their craft in Florence. Due to their excellence and their mastery of the new architectural language shaped by Brunelleschi, the palace is not only the very first Renaissance building created outside of Florence, but also the most beautiful Renaissance palace in absolute. Our friend Péter Farbaky, one of the best researchers of Quattrocento art in Hungary has pointed out that this edifice inspired several important details of the – since then vanished – late 15th-century palace of King Matthias in Buda, from the marvelous ground-floor arcades through the studiolo to the hanging garden looking at the hills – of Marche and Buda, respectively – and visually merging with them.

The bookshop in the native house of Raffaello is the richest source of the literature on the local history of Urbino. The great amount of these publications demonstrates both the self-consciousness of the town and the vigor of the local workshop of urban history. A remarkable part of these works are signed or introduced by the critic, historian of French literature, senator and university rector Carlo Bo (1911-2001), whose name has been adopted by the university of Urbino. From the abundant selection we have purchased the monograph of Urbino by Franco Mazzini, the catalog of local houses and palaces by Franco Negroni, the photo album by Pepi Merisio with the descriptions of Carlo Bo and Ermete Grifoni, and the 18th-century description of Urbino by two cardinals of Clement XI who was a member of the local Albani family. We will also present them later here, on our blog.

A great part of the only English book on Urbino written by June Osborne and illustrated with beautiful photos can be read in the library of Google. But, strangely, we cannot find much more on the web about Urbino. In Italian only some summary lists of monuments, while in other languages not even that much. But the web only reflects what we have also seen in the reality while traveling in Marche: that this province has not yet been discovered by tourism, unlike its counterpart on the other side of the mountains, Tuscany. Interestingly, only some American journals and blogs publish some competent descriptions about the town and its surroundings, by Christopher Solomon in the Times, by David VanderVelde from Kansas, by Anne & Kirk Woodyard from Washington, or in the Sunday supplement of the Independent. The author of this latter article, who meticulously describes hour by hour his day spent here stayed in the same hotel where we did: in the Albergo Italia.

At the reception of Italy Hotel – with the poster of the Carlo Bo memorial conference in the background – a postcard from 1934 advertises that it counted as a prestigious hotel already at that time. Curiously, if you do not require a room with hill panorama then this is also one of the cheapest hotels in the town. Sitting at the breakfast tables under the arcades of the inner courtyard we have a view of the hillside from where at the previous sunset we have taken the above photo of the town seen from the south-west. It is a strange feeling to sit in your own photo.

Nevertheless, if you do not only spend a half day here as we did now, you can also do what we have long wished to do: to stay for some days in an agriturismo, an ancient lonely farmhouse in the nearby mountains converted into an inn. There are plenty of such places all over Italy, and especially in Marche. The accomodation is less costly, more archaic and perhaps also more personal than in the town, the environs are splendid, and you must only make up your mind to drive some kilometers along zigzag mountain roads even in the late night after a dinner taken in the town. Places like this include for example the Colcello, the Cà Gnoni, the Girfalco (“Falcon-flyer”, where you can also learn hawking, and whose panoramic photo taken from here was inserted above), or the Locanda della Valle Nuova, whose young mistress Giulia and her parents practice bio-economy in their several hectares large estate, maintain a small library of local history for their guests, organize courses of wool-dyeing, and she writes a blog in English on the sights and events of the zone. To go through the web sites of the several dozen similar places in the neighborhood is a magnificent travel in itself.

When I’m writing this, the total death toll of the Sichuan earthquake is already estimated at 70 thousand, and the number of the wounded at a half million. Five million people have lost their homes, and those living in the countryside have started en masse to march toward the cities. The barrages of almost four hundred storage-lakes have cracked, and the incessant rainfall is menacing with new catastrophes.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow a three days general mourning is observed both in China and among the overseas Chinese.

I only note in passing that a number of Hungarian parties have found with a bon goût this moment as the most appropriate occasion to propose a motion, in terms of which the Hungarian parliament – alone among all the parliaments in the world – should condemn the aggression of the Chinese government in Tibet. Questions like how much justified is this in the present complex situation of Tibet – of which I would like to write later –, whether this really promotes and not rather obstructs the Tibetan case, to what extent this is a substitute action and how many things could be really done for Tibet, whether it is effective to publish such a statement alone and not in diplomatic league with other countries, why we advocate exactly this case when we bravely keep silent in every other, how much this will undermine our relations with China and how great harm it will do to our country, and whether it is really humane to do this exactly in the middle of the mourning of the other and what legitimate reactions can be rationally expected thereupon from the other – all this does not interest these gentlemen who are exclusively concerned of the domestic political consequences of their move. A move just as expensive and just as deeply cynical as many others that all our parties made in the last years, from threatenings with (hardly existing) neofascism and with the „thirty million Romanian employees” that would flow in after the opening of the borders, to the irresponsibly proposed and irresponsibly sabotaged referendum of 2005 on the dual citizenship of Hungarians living in the neighboring countries whose failure caused the largest moral and emotional rupture in the connections with these populations, and all the other moves that have been altogether drifting us toward the inevitable catastrophe.

“I would like to offer a donation for the survivors of the Sichuan earthquake.” The employee of the Chinese consulate looks stunned. “Are you Hungarian?” Whoever offers a donation to Sichuan cannot be but Chinese, even if he has a nose as long as devils. “Tui, xiongyaliren.” “Did you come from the government?” “No, I’m a private person.” The face of the boy relaxes into a smile. “There behind you to the right, there is the door. Come in.”

In the room the Consuless and two other women are counting money, the donations of the Chinese living in Hungary. They offered a hundred and fifty thousand dollars until last Friday, and the amount is continuously increasing. The Polish government gave a hundred thousand to China. The King of Saudi Arabia fifty millions. The name of Hungary does not figure in the reports. Zhen tells me that Chinese companies and private persons have collected sixty five billion dollars thus far, and aid concerts incessantly follow each other where masses strive to offer the most possible to their compatriots in need. This is how a nation looks like. “Did many Hungarians give as well?” I ask the Consuless. “You are the very first one.” “Perhaps the events are not much announced in the news”, she adds as a benevolent palliation.

We originally dedicated this money to cover the schooling of a little Tibetan boy, but we have lost the person who was the guarantee that this money would go to the right destination. It is strange that now it goes to that part of Sichuan where a Tibetan minority of several millions is also struck by the catastrophe. Perhaps right to another little Tibetan boy.

Palma de Mallorca is a city of inner courtyards. The old town has more or less conserved its rambling Arabic street network which, according to the custom of the Orient, drove back public life from the narrow streets into the patios of the houses. In these courtyards which until the beginning of mass tourism in the twentieth century were open to the street, occurred from birth through weddings and conspiracies, through trading and disputes to death the whole public life of the neighborhood, that is the larger part of a Mediterranean man’s life.

The large new book of Pedro de Montaner and Manuel Oliver, Patios de Palma enumerates about a hundred and twenty patios in the old town – and the third volume containing even more findings has not yet been published. I would happily insert a link here, but you can hardly find even its title on the web. A peculiarity of this first comprehensive catalog of the patios of Palma is that it can be studied only there where its subject, in Palma, as if it were a manuscript. This fact shows well the cultural exclusivity of Mallorca surviving until today.

The cultural association Portal Forà in their page dedicated to patios counts, maps and illustrates with more than 400 photos and some 360º-montages about a hundred and fifty courtyards. The government of Mallorca presents the most important fifty ones in a schematic map with photos and short descriptions in four languages. In another page they also give longer description (here you have to click on the little eyes under the description to see the photo), while in a third page a short route recommended to visit them. Reviews also propose various routes to visit the most beautiful courtyards.

In these patios, most of which have their own cisterns – a great treasure in the dry island – we can literally understand the verses of Ibn al-Labbâna, poet of the 11th-century Arabic Mallorca – Medina Mayurqa –, recently quoted by us: „The water of her fountains is like wine / and her courtyards are similar to goblets.”

“Some houses presented the fantastic dispositions of Moorish architecture, for Arabs had lived in the island for more than four hundred years. Through the open gates one could see inner courtyards, the patios encircled by light columns, traditional fountains crowned by elegant iron armatures, gracefully curved scales, arcades overgrown with climbers in full bloom, windows with carved stone frames of an incomparable airiness, some of them also decorated with a moucharabie or mirador, a window-ledge in the Spanish fashion.”

We hate mysteriousness that suggests more than what it really covers. This is why we, in a quite uncouth way, explain that the title literally says “between dog and wolf”, and in a figurative meaning it refers to that moment of early morning twilight when

minus abnuerit noctem desisse viator,
Quam coepisse diem.

when the traveler already knows that the night is over
but he is not sure whether the new day is breaking.

We have translated into Hungarian these two verses of Silius Italicus in the early 90's, when we already knew more or less that the night was over. That the new day is not breaking, that we would have to get through twenty and probably even much more years between wolf and dog, that we did not yet know. But these two verses, the horror of this no-man's-moment has since then accompanied us in thought.

* * *

Arabo-Andaluzian poetry has an unforgettable image that was fixed in our memory long before Emilio García Gómez dedicated a study to it. These verses say the dawn separates lovers in that very moment when the jewels of the beloved woman suddenly turn cold. The cruel cold of the dawn marks the moment when one has to begin a new life, or – more humbly – a new day. There is something paradoxical in this expression. The dawn, the birth of the new day is marked with the signs of the cold and of the death. This metaphor has been applied on various political transitions from a long dictatorship into democracy. Or into who knows what.

* * *

It is the same word, “alba”, with its vocales so open, its deep internal whiteness and its ephemeral life, with its renewed objects, misty outlines and silver horizon that evocates a sudden cold. Spanish literature is born in this very word. The albadas with the impression of broken dreams and, in the same times, of conquest. From the jarchas and zéjeles, cantigas, villancicos, estribillos, full of cold springs, deers, shirts hung out on the air, hasty or broken embraces, to the agonizing “adónde te escondiste, amado, y me dejaste con gemido” (where have you hidden, my beloved, leaving me with crying”) of the Cántico espiritual of Saint John of the Cross, or to the inclusion of so many popular expressions in the best theatre of Lope de Vega: “Si os partiéredes al alba, / quedito, pasito, amor. / No espantéis al ruiseñor” (If you leave in the dawn / my little, my sweethart, my beloved / do not wake up the nightingale). A world of dawns, sometimes happy, sometimes broken. Full of hurry, of loss, and in some – very few – cases, of hopes.

This line of tradition is followed by that “unofficial hymn” of the still predemocrática, and therefore deeply uncertain Spain which was created with the Al alba of Luis Eduardo Aute.

This night, speaking among friends coming from opposite fines terrae about those experiences and those years, the political symbologies of the Spanish Transición and the East-European “change of regime” were subtly superposed on each other.

IN THE DAWN
Poem and music by Luis Eduardo Aute

I told you my love that I
fear the coming of the dawn.
I don’t know what kind of stars
are these roaring so wild, and why
the blade of the moon is so bloody.

I feel that the night is followed
by another, much longer night, and I
want to keep you tight, very tight
my love, in the dawn
in the dawn, in the dawn,
in the dawn, in the dawn,
in the dawn, in the dawn,
in the dawn, in the dawn.

Our never born children are hiding
in the cloacas, they will devore
the last flowers, as if they knew
that the new day is nearing with hunger.

I feel, that the night... (etc.)

Thousands of silent vultures
open wide their wings, but you,
my love, don’t bother with this
soundless dance, with the damned
dance of the dead, the dust of the
tomorrow.

How much more strong-minded and optimistic is the poem of the Iranian Mehdi Akhavan Sales, how much more it is as we would have liked to see ourselves. Even with the lack of skill of the music (2005) and clip of Soheil Nafissi. “Strange, such a hard poem with such a soft melody”, Kata says. Yes. But it is just like listening to Okudzhava with his four chords. And as the beautiful Persian girl appears, on the one hand it is like a camouflage, as if this was a love poem, and on the other hand her face, her flaming red rusari, her black hair falling from under the rusari, all her behavior is a mutiny. And this small mutiny is enough for that public to understand the big one, like it was for us some thirty or forty years before.

NIGHTS AND COMETS
Poem by Mehdi Akhavan Sales
Music by Soheil Nafissi

Of a mutiny against darkness speaks the dawn.
The night is gone and with daybreak speaks the dawn.
The sheep of darkness left the shepherd's constellation,
Of the mutinous and the departed speaks the dawn.

Rust slyly ate away at the shield of the night,
Of drawn blades speaks the­ dawn.
Of the scorching of the grayish grove of daybreak
Speaks the torch-holding dawn.

Of stars and mysteries and coquetry of the night,
Of the heard and the seen speaks the dawn.
Of the many falling stars in darkness,
Of shrouds torn by shooting stars speaks the dawn.

What was that loss of color and how come
The dawn speaks of pale visages?

The songstress of the choir of hope,
Of a mutiny against darkness speaks the dawn.

Yesterday with a shaking little plane run by the Valencian local government we flew over to Valencia. We had been invited by the local Polytechnic University to deliver a paper – in its never acceptable Spanish name intervención, and we really felt like WWI-interventionists while sitting over the rattling motor in the milky fog – about the electronic publications of Studiolum during the five days conference Imagen y Conocimiento – Tradición artística e innovación tecnológica. The young organizers welcomed us really warmly, introducing to us the most chic university clubs, while the audience interrogated us with keen interest, mostly about the sources and software background of our publications. However, I think it was the most useful for ourselves to have a quick overview of all the finished and ongoing projects of Studiolum. We ourselves were awed by seeing how many things we have already realized. Our confidence increased, and we look forward to the future with expectations.

We had also planned another program for Valencia. The complete corpus of Spanish emblem books to be published soon on DVD will also contain the album compiled by the Valencian notary Marco Antonio Ortí and published by the city in 1640 for the feasts celebrated on the 400th anniversary of the town’s reconquista from the Moors. This booklet described in detail the festive architecture and decoration of the procession embracing the whole city, so that the celebrators – who bought it or received it as a protocol gift before the feast – might clearly understand the complex allegorical program symbolizing the history of the city and the virtues of King James who reconquered it. We wanted to follow through the complete path of the procession guided by this description and by an illustrated map of Valencia contemporary with it, in order to display in photos its present condition which, if we disregard the decorations, has not changed much in respect to that of four hundred years ago.

Tomás Vincent Tosca, Map of Valencia (1704), detail representing the cathedraland its environment. We will include the explanation of thenumbers in a following post, where we willpublicate the complete routeof the procession.

However, the long conversation and festive lunch following the intervenciones has not left much time to us. We only had an hour left before the departure of the plane to Mallorca. We could only walk round the cathedral and the main square, the one-time starting point of the procession. As a compensation, this time too they were making preparations for a large-scale feast of Mary. Choirs made rehearsal in the cathedral, a large crowd was gathering for the festive Mass of 6 o’clock, outside they were appending flower globes and preparing the procession and fireworks. Even if we could not follow through the ancient procession, we could at least feel its atmosphere.

Indeed, Valencia is a very lively city. Among others, it is full of very inventive contemporary buildings and public statues. There are for example the Roman walls unearthed near to the main square some meters under the street level, with water running on a glass plate above them, so that you can see through its trembling down at the past, a piece of Atlantis. Or there is the dry bed of the ancient river meandering through the city which has been completely transformed into a decorative garden, five meters under the level of city traffic, so that anyone could sink beneath for a while in the river of silence. In the many ideas of the same kind it is especially attractive how naturally and temperately they have been realized. In Austria every idea like this would be skinned seven times, drummed into you, and mercilessly transformed into a geg.

And something else: the boots. The girls, even in the hottest weather, wear high boots. I have not seen such thing anywhere else in Spain, only in Italy. There, however, boots are made of precious fine skins of natural color, while here they attract your attention with the most varied colors from the zoologically impossible predatory patterns to the unambiguous tones of moulded plastic. It is strange, but they do not look bad in the foreground of experimental architecture and contemporary plastic art.

We have completed the catalog of the incunables of the Monastery of La Real in Mallorca. Besides the description of the volumes, the DVD also contains their complete facsimile. Tomorrow I take with me the first copy to Mallorca. We will present it on this weekend in the library of the monastery, and if we will be granted nihil obstat, we will publish it on the site of Studiolum already in the next week.

In Studiolum we primarily publish old prints with a thorough apparatus: searchable transcriptions, notes and commentaries, contemporary translations and extensive cross-references. As a consequence, we are more and more invited to collaborate in the preparation of annotated facsimile editions of manuscripts, codices, old books, engravings, archive photos either on DVD or on the web. This is how we started, besides other ongoing projects, the publication of the medieval codices of the Cathedral Library of Kalocsa, the edition of the special collections of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), the documentation of the incunables and the Baroque book bindings of the Ráday Calvinist Library, the publication of the Renaissance archive of the aristocratic Santacilia family in Mallorca, and now the catalog of La Real.

The publication of incunables may not appear as sensational as that of a medieval manuscript existing in only one copy. However, incunables – books printed before 1500 – are just as unique. Apart from the fact that every book has survived in very few copies only, each copy is rendered unique by the “supplementary works” done by hand, by the individually painted initials and engravings, but primarily by the very exciting handwritten commentaries and additions that are especially abundant in the volumes of La Real.

The Cistercian monastery of Santa María de La Real lays outside the one-time city walls of Mallorca, along the Camí dels reis, the “Road of the Kings”. It was founded by King James I, the Conqueror in 1229, after the reconquista of the island from the Arabs. The discussed etymology of the name “La Real” shows well the richness of the traditions of Mallorca. Some say it comes from the royal foundation, while according to others it is the Catalanization of the Arabic word “al-arriat” simply meaning “garden”, the large fields of olive trees surrounding the monastery which are now, after two thousand years of peaceful existence seriously threatened by forced urbanization.

Besides its ancient library, the monastery is also famous for having given shelter, after his inner conversion, to the the royal seneschal and troubadoure and later philosopher and mystic Ramon Llull (1232-1315), the father of combinatorics and the first master of Catalan literature who after his North African journey advised to the Pope to stop crusades and instead proceed to the conversion of Muslims through prayer and through establishment of Arabic schools. The foundation of the first Oriental departments from Oxford to Paris was the fruit of this advice. And according to the tradition it was in the library of the monastery that he obtained his knowledge of theology and philosophy. He also bequeathed his manuscript to the library.

Another illustrious entry in the annals of the monastery is that Wang Wei, noble descendant of the Phenicians of Mallorca celebrated here his marriage with Ana, the offspring of a most ancient Arabic family of the island. This is how traditions are accumulated in the island of Mallorca. What the sea has brought here will stay here for ever.

I am translating the recent Dante biography by Barbara Reynolds to Hungarian. (Large portions of the original English can be read here, while the Hungarian version will be published for Christmas at the Europe Publisher). It is an excellent book. The author, who studied and translated Dante throughout all her life – on this I want to publish some touching details in a next post – decided at the age of ninety-two to “read all his works again, this time with an independent mind”, and as a consequence “present a portrait of Dante, the poet, the political thinker and the man, which has not been seen before”. She has managed to do so indeed. During the three years of “lectura Dantis” accomplished at the Italian department I did not learn as much about Dante as from this book. This is obviously no great eulogy for anyone who knows the standard of the Italian department in Budapest, but even for them it will be a dazzling qualitative leap that from now on they will have at least one good book to read during the five years.

It is an especially great – and rare – achievement that the book is enjoyable both for experts and non-experts. It gives a brief and clear overview on the hopelessly intricate Italian politics – which deeply influenced the career and writings of Dante –, on the life and ideas of the author, as well as on the almost untraceable path and episodes of the Comedy. Whoever having read this book will embark with easy heart upon the Comedy. He or she will not be frightened away any more by the dark forest of untold names and unnamed events but, having a clear grip of the situation, will be able to completely dedicate himself to the literary and human subtleties of the works, also continuously pointed out by Reynolds. And as a bonus, as Reynolds herself writes, “almost every chapter contains new ideas and fresh insights, some of them radical, many controversial”.

While translating the chapter on the ninth circle of Hell, I believed for a moment that I also might increase the number of new insights. Here Dante and Virgil arrive to the bottom of Hell, the very center of the globe of the earth where the king of demons Lucifer personally tortures the perpetrators of the greatest sin, those who betrayed their benefactors. The three main figures among them are Judas, Brutus and Cassius who betrayed Christ and the Empire ordered by God, respectively, and who are strangled by the very mouth of Lucifer for ever and ever.

“That upper spirit,Who hath worse punishment,” so spake my guide,“Is Judas, he that hath his head withinAnd plies the feet without. Of th’ other two,Whose heads are under, from the murky jawWho hangs, is Brutus: lo! how he doth writheAnd speaks not! Th’ other Cassius, that appearsSo large of limb.”

Reynolds’ British sense of reality cannot refrain from commenting on this description:

Given his [Lucifer’s] enormous height, which from Dante’s indications has been calculated to be over 1,400 feet, and given that about one-half of him is visible above the ice, his three heads area about 700 feet above Dante’s own. There is a conflict here between realistic description and poetic imagination, since from so far below and in such darkness it would be impossible for Dante to see, for instance, that Cassius is sturdy of limb.

I, however, am thrilled with a discovery. A silent Brutus… a fat Cassius… let us wait a moment. Well, Dante did not have to see this at all: he could know it from Plutarch. Is it not in the Parallel Biographies that Julius Caesar says he is not afraid of the merry and fat Cassius, but rather of the silent and sombre Brutus? And if so, then how can it escape the attention of Reynolds that this saying is repeated verbatim in Julius Caesar?

While searching for the volumes of Plutarch and Shakespeare, I am also enlightened by further thoughts. In fact, Plutarch was only discovered at the middle of the 15th century, and he has been translated only since the middle of the 16th century. Shakespeare read him in the novelistic English translation of 1579 by Thomas North that had been prepared on the basis of the verbose French translation by Jacques Amyot (1559). How was it known to Dante? Perhaps through the same prophetic foresight with which he had described, two centuries before the age of discoveries, the Cross of the South to be seen on the southern sky?

This vision melts away in a minute. This quotation of Shakespare sounds correctly like this:

Let me have men about me that are fat;Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.Would he were fatter! But I fear him not:Yet if my name were liable to fear,I do not know the man I should avoidSo soon as that spare Cassius.

There is Cassius and there is fatness, there is silence and soon there will be Brutus as well, but… not in that way.

As in the tricky question, like what is ‘fork’ in German: Gabel, where were the languages confused: Babel, who killed Cain: Abel. Er… I mean…

One of a blog’s greatest advantages in contrast to scientific publication is that one can report in it not only on those discoveries that have proved true, but also on those that have only caused intellectual pleasure, even if for a minute only.

Speak more slowly.
Tell the truth.
If you don’t know, tell: “I don’t know”.
It is not true that you don’t know.
You had to hear it.
You had to see it.
You lie.

It was an important stage in the history of cultural anthropology, and the heroic age of the birth of applied anthropology when, after Pearl Harbor, a large number of American anthropologists commissioned by the government composed and published in a row the booklets of the “Pocket Guide” series that prepared the soldiers of the American army for the etiquette of the Pacific islands to be conquered and for the communication with local population. Just as I write this, they announce the publication of the book of David H. Price on this turn of anthropology which also enlarges upon the dubious role played by social anthropologists in the present Islamic-Eastern wars of the United States.

It is strange to see how in certain situations the formal “you” – so much required in good Russian – switches over to informal “thou” even in the written ukaz. I do not even know whether it is possible to say in any language which distinguishes “you” from “thou” that “if you will not keep silent, I will kill you.” I think no.

Do you want to fight at our side?
Do you want to serve in our army?
You don’t want to fight against us?
You don’t want to fight at all?
Did they mistreat you in the service?

I did not know that simultaneously with the Americans the Soviet army also brought into service a similar series of booklets, mutatis mutandis of course. This Russian-Estonian “military conversation dictionary” (разговорник), published in 1940 by the State Military Publisher of the Commissariat of Defence of the Soviet Union has got to me through my Uzbek translator friend Temur.

Are there any cattle (horses)?
How many cows (sheeps)?
Is there any hay (oat)?
For how many horses is it enough?
How many inhabitants are there?
Where does the chief of the village live?
Let the chief come here!
Free these houses for the army.

The booklet consists of three parts. The introductory part includes in seven points (а-ж) the basic expressions: first contacts, place and time, numbers, quantities, sizes, ranks. Then come the phrases most frequently used in the conversation with the two main groups of the natives, the soldiers and the “inhabitants” (жители), grouped around ten themes each. The Estonian equivalent of the Russian text is also given in Cyrillic transcription for the sake of an easier pronunciation.

How many minutes ago?
After how many days?
After how many hours?
After how many minutes?
Tell the number only.
Repeat it.
In what part of the day?

The structure of the conversations bears witness to a clear and settled methodology, to a thorough practical knowledge of how one can obtain unambiguous information through an unknown language. It attempts to limit the answers to yes and no, have them repeated, make counter-proofs, investigate the details one by one, have the numbers written, reassures, rebukes and praises.

Is it possible to obtain bread (meat)?
For how many people?
Collect and bring here the cows (sheep)!
Collect and bring [to eat] for … horses!Collect and bring [to eat] for … people!Don’t be afraid of the soldiers of the Red Army!

This methodology only loosens in the part where the person inquiring is curious of the opinion of the informers. I don’t know how he could understand without at least some knowledge of the language the answers given to such questions like “How do the [enemy] soldiers speak about the Soviet Union?” or “How is the population disposed to the soldiers?”

Did you kill someone among your commanders?
Whom did you kill? What was his position?
What was his [family] name?
What was his rank?
Are you a member of a political party?Name that party.

The one-time user of this booklet wrote an X with pencil at two places. The smaller X falls between the questions “Do they [the enemy] have any military dogs?” and “Do they have carrier-pigeons?”, perhaps a little closer to the dogs. The larger X stands near to the question “Where is the staff (headquarters)?”

The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Russian military map, 1940

The Soviet army occupied Estonia, allotted to the Soviet Union in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, on June 16, 1940, three days after the joining up of the German army in Paris. By June 21 they disarmed and took into captivity the whole Estonian army. Apart from them, until July 1941 54 thousand more Estonians were deported or executed, including almost the complete political and military leadership of the country. At the beginning of the German attack against the Soviet Union in July 1941, 33 thousand young Estonians were recruited by force in the Red Army, but just two weeks later they were qualified as unreliable and sent to the Gulag. The deportations and executions continued after 1944. By 1945 Estonia lost 25% of its population. This was the highest proportion of loss of population during World War II in all Europe. Between 1945 and 1956 further cleansings and deportations of “kulaks” followed. Simultaneously, the forced immigration of Russian population began.